Library filed under Structural Failure

Climate change, extreme weather, and Natural Catastrophe (Nat Cat) events also jeopardize project performance and pose risks to an investor’s profile. ...the insurance market is developing new products to protect wind-farm developers and operators. Here are a few risks typical of onshore wind projects with tips on how to protect wind portfolios.

The turbines ran for three months before one blade fell to the ground 190 feet below. Then a second blade crashed through a nearby storage building's roof, falling into a conference room. No one was hurt. The city asked the builders to remove the contraption and rebuild it. That happened. Then another blade came loose.

Vern Martin, a mechanical engineer and vice-president of Flowcare Engineering consulting company in Cambridge, Ont., believes a blade may have malfunctioned and struck the column, causing it to buckle. "That ... has actually been recorded as occurring before in some of these other failures," explained Martin.

A company in Chatham-Kent, Ont. has shut down all 51 of its wind turbines as a precaution until an investigation reveals what caused one of the turbines to collapse last Friday. The turbine in Raleigh Township, near the corner of Drake Road and the 16th Line, collapsed on itself.

The turbine that collapsed was a GE 1.5MW xle, placed in service in 2011 by US-based Invenergy as part of the 52-turbine (78 MW) Raleigh wind facility in Chatham-Kent in southwest Ontario. The project was soled to Terraform in 2015. No information has been released as to the cause of the failure.

The toppled turbine was discovered by a hunter scouting for coyotes early this morning in Harwich Township, according to The Blenheim News Tribune. The huge turbine blades and motor assembly crashed to the ground and the support structure appear to be folded in half.

A wind turbine lies in a field after it collapsed during storm 'Burglind' in Volksdorf near Hanover, Germany. The 70-meter tower collapse happened on Wednesday, Jan. 3 2018 after parts of the rotor had broken. Nobody was injured.

One of the containers of the park of batteries of electricity storage on the site of Engie with Drogenbos caught fire on Saturday morning. While the fire was contained, the incident caused a release of toxic gas into the air. The municipality of Drogenbos asked residents to keep their windows and doors closed.

WindShare's own blog about the Exhibition Place turbine shows it has been plagued with problems over the past five years. The issues began after the turbine's main bearing was replaced in 2011. ...A series of what the operators called "cascading faults" took the turbine off line from the summer of 2012 until March 2013.

One of seven wind turbines on the island of Pag, in Croatia, collapsed after high winds hit this Croatian island on Friday. So far, the exact cause of the turbine collapse is unknown, but it is assumed that one blade had broken first, which disturbed the balance of the construction, Croatian media reported.

DTE Energy's Sigel wind energy facility experienced another blade failure. Other blades have failed in recent years at the same project. The Sigel project is comprised of 40 GE 1.6-100 towers and was placed in service in October 2012.

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